John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I am surprised that the member for Griffith has asked me this question, because the secretary of the commission wrote to him expressing a view on the matter. Nonetheless, I will take him through it and explain the position for the benefit of the parliament. The decision by the government to establish the Cole inquiry followed a request from the Secretary-General of the United Nations in the wake of the Volcker committee inquiry, and I will quote the relevant extract from the spokesman for the Secretary-General. This is what he had to say:

He notes that a vast network of kickbacks and surcharges has been exposed, involving companies registered in a wide range of member states, and certified by them as competent to conduct business under the Programme—

that is, the oil for food program. He continued:

He hopes that national authorities will take steps to prevent the recurrence of such practices in the future, and that they will take action, where appropriate, against companies falling within their jurisdiction.

That is precisely the request that the government responded to—in other words, to take action against companies falling within their jurisdiction. There were three such companies named in the Volcker inquiry. There was the AWB and there were the other two, which have not received very much coverage, which is hardly surprising. We thought the correct thing to do was to establish an inquiry as to whether those companies had broken any law of the Commonwealth or a state or territory of Australia in relation to their conduct. It was precisely in response to the request of the Secretary-General that we established the inquiry.

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